Venomous snake strikes captured in extreme detail through high-speed videos for first time
Scientists finally know how venomous snakes sink their teeth into their prey thanks to a series of high-speed videos.
Scientists have captured the moment a venomous snake lunges for its meal in photographs and videos since the early 1950s. But the strikes happen so quickly – in just 0.1 seconds – that old cameras weren’t fast enough to capture all the detail. Meanwhile, more recent field recordings of snake strikes have often been limited by low resolution and dim lighting, the researchers wrote in the new study.
To better understand how different types of snakes attack their food, the researchers visited Venomworld in Paris, a pet store where study co-author Rémi Ksas and his colleagues regularly extract venom from snakes and scorpions for medical and pharmaceutical purposes. There, they made fake prey out of a muscle-like medical gel and suspended it in front of 36 species of venomous snakes while filming with multiple high-speed cameras.
When tempting the snakes to strike, “I flinched several times”, co-author of the study Silke Cleurenbiologist at Monash University in Australia, said in a statement.
After recording more than 100 high-speed videos of 36 different snake species striking fake prey, scientists spotted attack patterns of these reptiles. The footage revealed that most vipers bit their target within 0.1 seconds of their thrust, faster than the startle response of most mammals, meaning their prey are unlikely to escape. While some elapids — the family that includes the deadly coarse-scale viper (Acanthophis rugosus) and the Cape coral snake (Aspidelaps lubricus) — were as fast as viperids, others took more than 0.3 seconds to reach their prey.
Different families of snakes also injected their venom in different ways. Viperids struck quickly from a coiled position, but sometimes did not get a good viewing angle on their bites. If this happened, the viper would remove a fang from its prey and reinsert it in a more favorable position before injecting its venom.
Elapids took a more sneaky approach, slipping close to their prey to reduce the distance they had to cover. They then slightly unclenched their jaws and bit again several times, “likely to prolong the flow of venom to their prey,” the researchers write in the study.
The team also observed two snakes from the colubrid family, the mangrove snake (Dendrophilic Boiga) and Fischer’s tree snake (Toxicodryas pulverulenta). These “back-fanged” snakes inject venom through the teeth at the back of their upper jaw. When T. pulverulenta biting the false prey, it would slide its fangs back and forth across the gel, creating crescent-shaped wounds that can help it deliver as much venom as possible.
Future studies could determine whether prey size has an effect on snake attack, the researchers write in the study.
